Despite the laws of nature, Cosmopolitan magazine and every other women's rag out there aging doesn't happen gradually. It happens all at once, like a lightening bolt out of the sky. You blink and then your body has deteriorated into a giant puddle and you don't even know what hit you. I was in Vegas this weekend for my Nana's 80th birthday and for the first time I realized she and my Poppop are getting old. I know you must be thinking, "Duh, Nina, she is turning 80." But they have never seemed feeble until this trip. They have slowed down to a crawl. My grandfather nows uses a walker. Both of their minds are still as sharp as tacks (thank god for that), that is when my grandmother can hear you. It made me sad. Sad and irritable. I think my father would argue that Vegas itself is what made me sad and irritable. But it was seeing them getting older which inevitably made me think about my parents growing older and you could see how thoughts could carry on in a depressing direction. My mother is slowly but surely losing her hearing (she insists that it is selective hearing, and it may be, but all the same she yells out "what?" a heck of a lot more frequently) and my father now has to take cholestoral medication. I know it is just the natural progression of life but it always seems to happen in moments. The world shifts one way or another and suddenly time telescopes and you are left with big chunks of it, bound by certains memories...such as childhood, college, my twenties. I don't know if this makes sense. Perhaps I am just getting mopey because my 26th birthday is around that corner meaning I am closer to thirty that 20. Somehow I never thought that I would be 26. I say this every year. I should just enjoy it, right? In the spirit of getting older... here is a sappy song.
More songs melancholy(or not so melancholic) and wonderful...
Warren Zevon
Tim McGraw
Patty Griffin